Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 633 & 634, October 1994

The Corpse in the Attic by Gunnar Staalesen

© 1994 by Gunnar Staalesen

EQMM has a long tradition of searching out mystery writers from other parts of the world. During the thirteen years in which EQMM’s founder Fred Dannay held his worldwide mystery short-story contests, submissions poured in from six continents and more countries than we can list here. This month we introduce an author known and respected in his native country of Sweden, but previously unpublished in the United States. Gunnar Staalesen is primarily a writer of crime novels, but he has had several of his small collection of short stories translated for EQMM. We begin with a piece that he describes as having a Roald Dahl-like atmosphere...

The air up in the attic was stuffy and stale, the way it usually is in such places; a smell of moth-eaten old clothes, yellowed, dusty books, cardboard boxes from the 1950s tied up with fraying twine, and big empty suitcases made of fiberboard. If they were empty, that is.

“Good God, Karl!” gasped Edvard when he got to the top of the steep attic ladder. “Why don’t we just take it all straight to the dump?” He ran his hand through his gray-streaked hair, and in the dim light of the attic I saw even more clearly how lined his face had become. I gave a little shiver. It was practically a mirror image of my own face that I was looking at.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think we ought to go through it. We might find something... that we think we ought to keep.”

After our parents died within a few months of each other, Edvard and I were the ones who had the task of going through the house; sorting out the most important papers; collecting photographs, letters, and other things we wanted to save; dividing up what we thought was worth dividing; and then getting rid of all the rest, either by selling it or, as Edvard so aptly put it, by taking it “straight to the dump.”

Big houses like this seem even bigger on such occasions. The dressers suddenly have more drawers and the cupboards more shelves. You find little desks and old wardrobes in places you never remember seeing any, but then it was a good many years ago that the two of us had left home. After Dad retired, our parents lived a quiet and peaceful life, and aside from the house and the property it was on, they hadn’t really accumulated much of value, so it was a relatively simple inheritance to divide up. We wound up staying friends afterwards, too.

The old house was situated behind the autumn colors of high hedges, on a slight incline. On the neighboring lots there were other old tumbledown castles — and here and there a new house where someone had bought part of a lot that was big enough for two. It had been a quiet neighborhood to grow up in, with big yards and plenty of places to play. In many ways it was a sheltered environment, and we could only remember one great tragedy...

We had spent several days going through the house from the cellar all the way up to the top floor, and at the end of each day we felt dusty and grimy. It was with great reluctance that we set up the ladder and climbed up into the attic. The trapdoor was hard to budge, and we had to brace our backs against it to lift it open. The light switch hung on a loose cord from the roof, and when we turned on the light, we stood there blinking our eyes.

“I really don’t remember it being this big,” said Edvard, looking around in despair.

“I don’t either,” I replied, hearing the surprise in my own voice.

We hadn’t spent much time up here either. Because of the steep ladder and the risk of accidents, our parents had forbidden us to come up here alone; so it was only in their company — plus a couple of perilous expeditions when we had been home alone — that we had ever been up here. The naked bulb below the roof cast a distorted light over the room, giving the boxes and suitcases peculiar contours and sketching odd shadows up across the slanting walls.

“It certainly could use airing out,” said Edvard, wrinkling his nose.

I nodded in silence, glumly moving the nearest box. There was nothing to do but get started.

Several hours later we had worked our way over to the wall, deep inside the attic and as far away as possible from the trapdoor. The light from the bulb below the roof barely reached that far, so we had turned on a flashlight, which lay there lighting up the floor next to us.

Against the wall stood an iron-studded wooden trunk.

“Do you remember this?” asked Edvard.

“No.” I shook my head. “It must have been up here from before I can remember.”

We glanced behind us. We hadn’t found much that was worth keeping. Almost everything was stacked up in a comer of the attic so the moving company could deal with it when they took over. A few personal belongings, some old photo albums, and a handful of books were gathered over by the trapdoor. The old trunk was the only thing that remained.

Edvard bent down. “It’s locked,” he said as he tried to budge the lid.

“It is?” I stared at the keyhole. It was empty.

I bent down next to him and gripped the heavy, well-constructed lid. It was impossible to get it open.

Edvard straightened up, his back aching and his knees stiff. “There was a crowbar down in the basement storeroom, wasn’t there?”

“You’re right,” I replied. “I’ll go get it.”

He stood there staring at the trunk. “Don’t you think...”

“What?”

“Don’t you think there’s kind of a weird smell over here?”

I took a deep breath through my nostrils and shrugged. “That’s how it is in old attics, you know. That’s how the old days smell.”

Then I went down to get the crowbar.

When I came back up, he was sitting on top of the trunk.

He was two years younger than me, and we had spent an undramatic childhood together. He had become a teacher and was married, with two children. I worked in an office in the county administration building, and I had a wife and three kids, a boy and two girls. We had been lively, fun-loving boys, and we grew up to be staunch, middle-of-the-road, middle-class men. His hair was going gray; I was in the process of losing mine.

Neither of us had any intention of moving back into our childhood home. We had each settled down in our own neighborhood in modem single-family homes with good friends and neighbors. We could get a nice price for the empty house, particularly because of the location — and divided by two, we would each get a handsome sum, which would give us the opportunity of “fixed assets.” He was thinking about a motorboat; I needed a new car.

Our parents had been proud of us. We had both grown up to be well-established, decent citizens without causing them any great sorrow or worry.

I dropped the crowbar to the floor and said, “Here. You try it first since you’re younger.”

He got up from the trunk and picked up the crowbar. He stood there weighing it in his hand. It was heavy — I’d noticed that on the way upstairs.

He tried to poke the pointed end of the crowbar into the lock itself, but it hit metal, and he couldn’t get a firm grip on it.

“Try a little to the side,” I suggested.

He did as I said. The crowbar went in farther this time, and he shoved against it, leaning his weight into it. The lid of the trunk creaked, but the lock still wouldn’t give. “You’re going to have to help me,” he gasped, his face flushed.

“Move in closer to the trunk,” I said, going over to stand next to him. We counted to three and put all our weight on the crowbar... once, twice, three times...

The lock yielded with a sharp snap, and the lid of the trunk sprang open and slammed against the wall behind. A nauseating grayish-white dust rose up in a cloud from the trunk — and an odd, sweetly rotten smell billowed toward us.

We stepped back from the trunk in one simultaneous movement, and I could feel my stomach churning. There was something about that smell... It wasn’t just the smell of the attic — it was the smell of something stronger, more dangerous. It was the smell of death.

The cloud of dust quickly settled. Edvard stood there staring at the trunk as if he half expected an ancient phantom to rise up out of it. I leaned down and picked up the flashlight. I aimed the beam at the trunk. From where we were standing the trunk appeared to be empty.

We looked at each other. Then we moved closer — one step, then two.

Finally we could see all the way to the bottom of the trunk. It took a minute before we fully realized what was lying there.

At the bottom of the trunk was the shriveled-up, partially decomposed body of a child. The skin was like old rotten leather, and the skeleton could be glimpsed in places. The clothing had deteriorated and it was difficult to tell what it had been. And yet the same thought and the same name rose up inside both of us. We looked at each other with horror and shock in our eyes. Edvard stammered, “V–V-Vilhelm?”

I nodded mutely in reply.

I still remember — as if it were yesterday — that gorgeous, sun-filled summer day almost thirty years ago when Vilhelm disappeared. It was the only tragedy that ever happened in our neighborhood during the whole time we lived there, and the memory of it had haunted us throughout a large portion of our lives.

Vilhelm lived two houses away from us, and agewise he was exactly between Edvard and me. The three of us were pals, and we made that section of town our own. The eight or nine trees behind our property became endless forests, the incline down toward the village creek became a slope leading to the Indian village. And in the summer we built a hut out on the island in the fish pond when we could swim out to it.

On the afternoon that Vilhelm disappeared we had been playing hide-and-seek. I had hidden under the cellar trap door, and when no one found me I came out on my own. Then it was my turn to be “it,” and Edvard and Vilhelm took off and hid.

It was a sunny, quiet afternoon — a Sunday. In the surrounding houses our parents were taking a nap after lunch. From a porch a short distance away we could hear faint music from a radio, and up in the eaves little birds were chirping cheerfully in the pure blue summer sky.

I counted slowly to fifty. Then I started searching. Edvard I found right away — he was lying under the hedge facing the neighbor’s house to the west. But Vilhelm we couldn’t find anywhere. I asked Edvard whether he had seen where he went, but he shook his head. We ran down toward the “Indian camp” and bushes around it. No Vilhelm.

We were too young to be worried. We sat down near the fish pond for a while and threw pebbles. He’ll turn up when he gets tired of hiding, we told each other. But he didn’t turn up. And we didn’t know then that we would never see Vilhelm again.

When we thought we had waited long enough, we started calling him. “Vilhelm! Vil-helllm!” But there was no answer.

“Maybe he went home.”

“Let’s go over there and find out.”

We went over to Vilhelm’s house, but he hadn’t come home. His mother and father came with us to look for him, and now the news spread rapidly from house to house: Vilhelm was missing. Our parents came outside too and joined the search. But it was as though Vilhelm had been swallowed up by the earth. We were asked time after time: Where had we seen him last? Where had we been earlier in the day?

Finally someone called the police, and the search escalated.

The days following Vilhelm’s disappearance were gloomy and anxious. His name was in the paper along with a picture and description — at first as an ordinary missing-persons notice, but when it became clear that he really was missing, the notices got bigger. Edvard and I were both old enough to read the papers, and our eyes widened and got tired from reading all the theories about what might have happened to our friend.

Most of the theories hypothesized an accident. The fish pond was dragged and the length of the creek was too. The neighborhood was combed in search of old wells, manhole covers, or other death traps — but without results. Houses were searched from cellar to attic, but Vilhelm was nowhere to be found.

Then the theories began to shift toward the idea that a crime must have been committed. Could the boy have been kidnapped? Had anyone observed any strangers in the neighborhood? Had anyone heard a car?

These questions were never answered, and Vilhelm stayed missing. His disappearance remained an unsolved mystery all the way up to that moment in the dusty old attic when we two middle-aged brothers stood and stared down at the corpse of what had once been our little ten-year-old playmate.

I remembered his parents — during the years that followed. We would hear his mother night after night, as she walked by out on the road between the houses. She would be calling his name, as if he had merely forgotten to come home for the night, for months afterwards. Finally she gave up, and after that we never heard her say a word. She seemed to shrink before our very eyes. His father we saw very little. He would drive up in his car after work and sit inside all afternoon and evening. The grownups said that he drank, and he died quite young.

Edvard looked at me with a grim expression. “He must have slipped up here, hid in the trunk, and then the lid fell down. Maybe he was knocked out, and then the lock clicked, and since there was no key to the trunk, he couldn’t open it. Later... they didn’t bother to search hard enough.”

I nodded but was slightly taken aback. “Can locks like that actually click shut?”

He looked at the trunk and the lock and gave a big shrug. “I have no idea. Come on. There’s nothing more we can do up here now. Not today. We’re thirty years too late, Karl.”

He pulled me away and over to the trapdoor.

Halfway down the ladder a new idea occurred to me. “What if — if he sneaked up here alone, then the trapdoor would be open and the ladder would be down, wouldn’t they?”

He walked ahead of me into the living room. There, in the middle of the table, lay a couple of pictures we had put aside: two old, framed photographs of our parents — Dad with his rough, wide face; Mom’s oval face with her hair pinned up.

Their eyes met ours across the table, and I realized that we were thinking the same thing. We remembered our kind but unpredictable father and the violent outbursts of rage he would have if anyone happened to disturb him during his afternoon nap; and how several times he had hit both Edvard and me so hard we could hardly stay on our feet. And we remembered our wise, sensible mother, who had always been so good at covering up whenever he got out of control.

— translated by Stephen Murray